


Who Have Made Me Not A Woman

by CaptainLordAuditor



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/F, F/M, The Calling, Trans Character, assissted suicide sort of, elven gender concepts, i just didnt feel like making new tags for that, jewish elves, sorta - Freeform, the dalish have 5 genders because i said so, transfeminine character, when i say female mahariel i really mean nonbinary transfemme mahariel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 18:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12965223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainLordAuditor/pseuds/CaptainLordAuditor
Summary: It would do no good to rely on prayers. You must act as though the gods have no power, her Abae said. And what if her prayers failed?or, how would a trans warden react to finding out about the broodmothers?





	Who Have Made Me Not A Woman

**Author's Note:**

  * For [batyatoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/batyatoon/gifts).



> this is a gift for batyatoon because in May we had a discussion about this.
> 
> It is now December. I work slowly, okay?

_And the sorrow of the impossible_   
_is a human pain that nothing will cure_   
_and for which no comfort can be found._   
_So, I will bear and suffer_   
_until I die and wither in the ground._ _  
_ -Kalonymus Ben Kalonymus, “on becoming a woman” 1322

 

* * *

 

Every child in the clan of Sabrae learned to herd.

It was not unusual that  Ele’eyu took a small herd to watch during his days. He learned the sling and the bow, to keep away Fenharel’s children. He and Tamlen once spent an afternoon trying to make the halla race, with Merrill waiting giggling to judge. But for the most part, he had a dog, and he had his sling, and that and his thoughts were all the company he needed to watch the herds.

Every fall, just after Annarinan, Gelram would order which ewes be bred to which rams, and between then and Annariyad he would keep patient watch over the pregnant ewes. Eli would help him, alerting him when a ewe went to relieve herself. He didn’t know why Gelram did this, and sometimes he would ask.

“It is for the ena’asha,” Gelram would say. He would take the clay jar he had collected it in, and label it with the date and the halla who had given it. As he did this he would hum or sing, sometimes the prayers of thanks, sometimes counting songs, but most often one Eli had never heard anyone but Gelram sing: _“In a coat of many colors, with her bow fought Ena’asha…”_

For a long time, Eli thought that Ena’asha was a prophet Gelram sacrificed to.

One day, he asked. “What’s the Enasha?”

Gelram smiled as if he had been waiting for a long time for Eli to ask this, sealed the jar, and sat back on his heels. “The Ena’asha,” he said. “Are neither. You know the story of the Four Giants, nu?”

Eli shook his head.

Gelram hummed quietly, putting things away and keeping his hands busy. All Dalish did that. A story was better told with sewing in the lap than with empty hands. “Once, in the days of Arlathan, the gods’ enemies sent a giant against us. The giant was great and mighty, and the Forgotten Ones bespoke a spell on him, that no man could slay him.” He smiled. “So a woman named Asha took her sword and went to slay him. So the Forgotten Ones sent another giant, and on this one they cast a spell that neither man nor woman could slay him. And so Ena’asha found her bow and slew him. She was a herder, like me.”

Eli furrowed his brow. “But you said no woman could kill it.”

“Yes. Ena’asha was not a woman. She was… she was like the halla. All the halla are she, nu? Unless you mean only the ram, halla are she. So was Ena’asha. And the urine I collect - you have watched your fathers tan the hides. You know the urine makes it soft. It made Ena’asha soft, too. They are magical creatures - the gods gave all that we might need for any transformation when they gave us the halla.”

The next day, Eli had another question. “Ena’asha’s dead.”

Gelram understood what he was asking, and he laughed. “You think Ena’asha was the only one? No, only the first, that we named those who follow after! Many walk her path.”

Eli thought about this for a long time.

When the halla had given birth, Eli tugged the sleeve of his Abae to tell him she wanted to be a herder, and ena’asha.

There was much delight, in the clan, at this. Gelram was getting old, and it was always better to have an enalen herder who knew the herds, who had grown up with them, than someone who had come from another clan.

* * *

When Eli was fourteen, Gelram let her decide the breeding of the herd she looked after. She nearly cried from the responsibility, then again when she realised she had to ask him for advice on everything.

When she was sixteen, there was a twist in her brain, and everything seemed too lively, or she seemed too wilted. Worse in the summer, with nothing to occupy her mind. She sometimes wondered what the point of anything in the world was, but her clan needed her.

Gelram and her fathers brought her advice. She took to whittling weapons to lessen the monotony of herding.

When she was seventeen, she sometimes wondered  - maybe hoped - that she would die soon.

When she was eighteen, she received her vallaslin.

A day of fasting, and hours of meditation, and hours more of pain as the vines curved over her face and her body.

She decided she wanted a new name. Dinah. For all Despair tempted her into death, she would not give in. This was her vengeance. To live, and strike against death.

Dinah was twenty one when Tamlen began courting her, and for the life of her she had no idea why. Enalen didn’t get married. Who would marry an enalen? She’d be out with the herds from sunrise to moonrise, keep watch every night when it was time for the births, and then there was the shearing. You’d always play second fiddle to the herds if you married an enalen, and never mind having children.

She turned him down.

When she was twenty two and Gelram was seventy one, he died in his sleep, just before Annariyad. Dinah wept and wailed and sat for eight days as though he were her father in blood.

* * *

Dinah was twenty six when it happened.

She was looking for her knife. Gelram had given it to her, and it had somehow slipped from her belt as she moved the herds, now temporarily given to Maren and her dog, and she needed it back.

She found her knife, and then she found Tamlen.

Three shemlen, whining and screeching about _treasure_. Dinah and Tamlen let them go  - they were snivelling fools, more likely than not to enthrall their village with tales of the otherworldly elves who had captured them.

Everything happened too fast.

She didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to her herds, to make sure her stock of tu’ashavh’alla was packed.

She wept for a long time on the road to Ostagar. The shemlen, she knew, would call her a man, and like leather, her body would need the proper care, the tu’ashavh’alla, to keep it soft.

What was the point of living if she could not serve her clan?

She would serve her clan, she decided. Not as a herder, but as a hunter of darkspawn.

Chances were, she’d die in the Blight anyway.

* * *

She nearly fell over from surprise when Alistair told her he’d only met a few women in the wardens.

She didn’t tell him, but - something about the reflection of the fire in his eyes and the turn of his ear made her wonder if he’d understand if she did. Maybe she wasn’t the only pretending to be something she wasn’t.

* * *

“I don’t understand. You are a woman.”

Dinah waited. She could not deny it, but nor could she confirm it and lie.

“But women do not fight.”

Goodness, where was Sten from? The moon? She bit her lip to keep from smiling. “Leliana fights. Many Dalish women fought - Asha, who slew giants. Lindiranae fought. My people say she was the last warrior to die in the invasion of our city Halamshiral. ‘Lindiranae took her blade, and with her fell the Dales’.”

Sten seemed more confused. “That does not follow. If you fight, you are a man. Therefore these elves you speak of, Asha and Lindiranae were men. As are you.”

Dinah sat down on the log to disguise her dizziness. “Sit down and explain, Sten. It’s tiring, craning my head to look at you all the time.”

Sten did so. “Women are artisans, farmers, sex workers, tammasraans. Laborers, soldiers, researchers and philosophers are men. There is nothing else left.”

Dinah scratched her head. She should probably trim her hair soon. “Is that how the Qunari do things?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not how the Dalish do. The Dalish….” she cast about for a metaphor, and found the flask of Tevene Fire on her belt. She removed it and held it up. “Mages, who can twist reality, set a man aflame with only a thought, throwing it from their hands. They can heal, and transform the look of a thing.” She paused to make sure Sten was with her.

“Yours, perhaps.”

Dinah ignored that - she’d ask him about it later - and went on. “That is their role. But with the proper tools, anyone can heal and throw fire. This, for example,” she shook the the flask slightly, “is filled with oil that will burn even on water. A mage’s fire is extinguished by water, and a Dalish scout, or a shemlen - a human, that is, guerilla fighter, or bard, can use this. You don’t need magic to do the same job. In the Dalish, everything works like that. A man or woman can hunt or weave as their skills lay. Leliana’s shooting no more makes her a man than you throwing this flask would make you a mage.” She wondered how long it would take Sten to understand what she said. When she had left her clan, she had worried about shemlen calling her a man, about access to tu’ashavh’alla, about armor fitting and making sure shemlen respected what she said. She hadn’t worried about explaining Dalish society to, of all people, a giant with metallic skin and a confusion about Ferelden in general.

At long last, perhaps a full five minutes later, Sten spoke. “Tell me more.”

“About the Dalish?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

Dinah got up to find a bucket and start the washing. “A game, then. You ask a question about the Dalish, I ask one about the Qunari. Agreed?”

Sten agreed.

“Get the dirty clothing then, and ask me something.”

As Sten collected the clothing, most of which had been worn from three days to a week, Dinah thought about what she would ask Sten. What were the tammasraans? Why were Qunari so strict about what gender did what? Were there other genders? What were those funny bumps on his head - or would that be rude to ask?

Sten returned to where Dinah sat by the stream, his arms full of clothing, a bar of soap balanced on top.

“Bodahn gave me soap with the laundry. He said you may use it if you do his as well.”

Dinah made a mental note to thank him and gestured for Sten to put the clothing down beside her. It was then she saw that he had also brought needles, thread, and a sewing knife to repair the tears in the clothes she washed.

Dinah decided she liked Sten. “Alright - you start. Ask me something about the Dalish.”

Sten paused, threading his needle, then asked, “you said the Dalish have hunters and weavers. What did you do?”

Dinah pulled out her uniform gambeson. It was stained in blood, but untorn. “I was enalen for my clan. The Dalish keep herds. It was my job to decide which of our rams were bred to which of our ewes, and to intervene during the birth if anything went wrong. We bred them in the fall, after our new year for the large moon. While the others were preparing for forgiveness, praying, cooking a feast, I wrote orders for our herders so their charges would give birth in early spring, at the new year for the small moon. I made medicines from our animals, and for them, and the ink for the vallaslin. These,” she added, gesturing to her face.

Sten handed her a pair of pants, rip on the leg neatly sewn. “And this is a woman’s job?”

“That’s cheating! It’s my turn.” There. She’d have another couple of minutes to think of an answer, and she’d get to learn something about Qunari. She grinned at Sten’s face, and asked, “What’s a tammasraan?”

“They are enalen for Qunari. Women who track genealogies and decide who will reproduce. They look after the children and decide what jobs they would be suited for.”

How strange.

“Enalen is not a woman’s job,” Dinah said. She scrubbed a stone on a stain of spider guts on Leliana’s habit. Blasted thing would never come out of the white. “Gender is like fighting, to Dalish. You can fight with magic, or arrows or swords. Up front, to protect, or to do damage with brute force, or with speed, or leverage, or simply out thinking them, or with patience. Fighters, those who take after the Emerald Knights, they take sword or mace and hit hard and with force. They sacrifice themselves so nobody else has to die. Scouts, we prevent the enemy from ever coming in contact with others, sometimes even ourselves. We set traps, shoot from a distance. When we get close, if we have to, we fight with speed, avoiding our opponent. Dalish mages don’t often fight, but when they do they outlast their enemies, using their environment to their advantage.”

She took a deep breath to stop her rambling. “There are more than two ways to fight, and there are more than two ways to live. Enalen is not a woman’s job, and it’s not a man’s job. It’s - it’s a job for the enalen. We are neither. I am ena’asha. The enalen before me was Gelram, ena’jun. I take humours to be…” she stumbled for the shemlen word. “Like female. Soft. ena’jun take ones to make them… statues.”

“Statues?”

“Like statues. Carved. Like men.”

(The word was chiselled, Sten told her, and she asked about his head bumps and found out Qunari usually have horns.)

Dinah told Sten about spinning halla’s hair, dyeing it, boiling the water off the urine to make tu’ashavh’alla, and he told her about the jungles and the aqun athlok. The notion that someone could so completely change to a man or a woman was bizarre and foreign.

* * *

When Ser Perth told her he didn’t know how to address an elven woman in her position Dinah grit her teeth, lifted her chin and with a steady gaze said, “Then stop thinking of me as a woman. Address me as you would a shemlen man in my place.”

She’d learned shemlen men don’t like it when she looked them in the eye.

* * *

Zevran didn’t judge her - but then, he was Dalish. Three weeks after they met, Dinah lay awake at night under the stars and wondered that he hadn’t killed her yet. He could slit her throat, slip out of the camp and be long gone before anyone noticed. Wasn’t that his goal, after all? Kill the Grey Warden?

Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Dinah thought about what she could possibly do after the Blight to continue serving her clan. Of the children she’d never have, the halla she’d never breed, the vallaslin she’d never give. What was life without a clan? Sometimes, Dinah wished for Zevran to slit her throat already.

* * *

Morrigan liked jewelry and sparkly things, and Dinah liked to hear stories of the Chasind, who often traded with the Dalish. Dinah’s sturdy slippers, lined in the fur of some small animal, had been made by a Chasind trader. Morrigan’s tattered feather capelet had once been Dalish.

Morrigan told her about the Wilds, and Dinah told her about the forest.

Dinah didn't die. She had to find a mirror for Morrigan, first.

* * *

Kolgrim wanted Dinah to destroy the ashes, and she stood there for a long moment, poised to pour the vial over it.

She thought of Andraste, how she spoke when the mute Shartan couldn’t, how she saw Shartan as an equal, never mind that he was an elf, never mind that he could barely speak, and she thought of the ghost of Shartan she spoke to, and how Andraste gave him the Dales.

Never mind what her successors did. Never mind Sister Amity, Renata calling for the death of all elves, never mind the brother who had been laughed out of camp when Dinah was sixteen for trying to convert the Keeper.

Never mind them. They had never listened to what Andraste had _said_ , and they would never see these ashes.

Surely Kolgrim had more in common with those who smashed statues of elves than Leliana did.

* * *

The dream did nothing for her. Telling tales, keeping history - this was not serving her clan for an enalen.

* * *

She cried when they reached the Dalish camp, and she was welcomed as enalen, and again when Leliana sang that night, a song for Tamlen that Dinah had never gotten the chance to sing.

* * *

She slayed Tamlen with her own hand, and for eight days she wept. A day in turn for each of the gods, and when Falon’Din bid her rise to anger instead of denial on the ninth day, she killed a bear and brought the fur as a cloak to Morrigan.

It wasn’t a mirror, but Dinah had made it. She wondered if she was too obvious.

It wasn’t a mirror, but it was warm to sleep on with Morrigan on her right and her dog Ghilan’Thin on her left.

* * *

She found a mirror for Morrigan, and the woman took it, somewhat in awe, and turned it over in her hands.

Later, Morrigan said to Dinah, “I wish to ask a question.”

She always talked like that when she didn’t know how to say it. Dinah had heard Morrigan practicing her conversations, and she didn’t blame her.

She stretched her legs toward the fire and said, “Then do.”

“I wish… what is your opinion on love?”

“On love?” Dinah tilted her head. This wasn’t what she was expecting. ”It’s...it’s a lot of things, I suppose. It’s a feeling, but it’s a kind of - a kind of choice, too. To do things because they make someone you care about happy, or because they need them. I don’t like sitting on birthwatch, but someone needs to. It needs doing to keep the halla, and the clan needs the halla. But you have to be able to talk about your choices, too. To tell someone you need them to take over birthwatch for a bit, because if a ewe goes into labor you’re so tired you’ll be more hurt than help. Or, if you can, to volunteer to do it for someone else. Not for any gain, just… because it’s needful. Why?”

“I… feel anxious when I look at you.” she sighed. “‘Tis irrational, I know! You are an impressive archer, you have protected me against my mother for no personal gain. Yet I feel… frightened at the prospect of you being injured, and I dislike it. I feel dependent upon you.”

Dinah tried to process this information, but she couldn’t parse it. Was this how shemlen thought? No wonder their towns were so strange. “Of course you’re dependent on me,” she said at last. “Isn’t that what clan is? People relying on each other? I couldn’t herd without my bow, but I can’t carve one on my own. That’s what... What love, what community, even, is. You can get by on your own, but you’re bigger than the sum when you’re not alone.”

“Then we are fools! We are too close. If we were to part ways, we could not stand on our own. This is a weakness for the both of us!”

Dinah swallowed. She had known this was coming. Nobody in their right mind was lovers with enalen. “Then… it’s better, that we not… continue whatever this is.”

Morrigan turned away. “Yes. It will make it easier in the end.”

* * *

She couldn’t sleep in the Deep Roads. The taint closed in on her like shemlen walls on an ena’asha made for the fields and hills where she had kept her halla, above, below, and all sides around her, pressing up against her right to block her bow hand, a cliff into the abyss on her left and an open field behind her with the whispers of Fen’harel creeping through the grasses, giving her the urge to constantly turn around and shoot blindly at the enemy behind her.

After the broodmother, she couldn’t eat, either. She retched everything she’d eaten onto the guts of the creature before her. It wasn’t much - she’d barely been hungry since they descended down here, and she dry heaved for what felt like hours. She wasn’t alone - Sten was the only one fit to search the corpses for anything useful.

She sat awake for hours afterward, staring blankly ahead of her, Ghilan’Thin laying on top of her, gazing up at her with those puppy eyes of his, but she couldn’t see them. She pet him unseeing, thinking about what it meant to be Dalish, to be ena’len, to be _ena’asha_ , to be feminine but not a woman, what it would mean to be a woman.

One day, her arrows and knives would fail. One day, the darkness she fought would come from her as it had Duncan. She could pray with all her might to Andruil who hunted the darkspawn alongside Dinah that when that day came she would die cleanly, a blade to her heart, but Andruil watched over a thousand other Wardens and a hundred thousand hunters, and any given prayer would go unanswered.

It would do no good to rely on prayers. _You must act as though the gods have no power_ , her Abae said. And what if her prayers failed? Would the darkspawn ignore her, knowing her for what she was? Would they drag her to their lairs, torturing her for nothing, the gods giving them no reward but her pain?

Worse - what if it worked? What if the magic that made them subsist without living, work without sleeping, sing without speaking, affected her, too? As the taint had transformed them from prideful, living mortals to hivemind creatures of unlife, might it also turn her to what it wished?

Would it be better, she wondered, to know that the universe, from the mighty Evanuris to the accursed Forgotten Ones, saw her as female, or to deny them the satisfaction of her transformation from elf to ungodly beast?

“Zevran.” her voice was flat and strained.

He looked up immediately, eyes meeting hers.

“Kill me. Swear on all the gods you know, that if they take me you will shoot me in the head.”

“On the owl of Falon’din and Andruil and on Fendakay’s vallaslin.”

He meant it, she knew. Fendakay, the Antivan demigod of assassins was not a man sworn by lightly. Even if he hadn’t sworn by Fendakay, she knew that she could trust Zevran on this. Alistair would balk at the suggestion, Wynne would insist on another solution, but Zevran would not hesitate, to take either vow or shot.

Something unspoken passed between them then. She couldn’t say what it was, but she knew he understood.

* * *

In hindsight, she probably should have waited longer before taking up with Zevran, but he was warm against her and understood at least a little of what it meant to be Dalish.

* * *

“Tell me a story.”

She stretched out on the grass. “What kind?”

“Anything. I’ve told you about Antiva. Tell me a story about the Dalish.”

She blinked slowly, thinking. “The first elf was called Hallath’evan - ‘he struggled with the gods’. He was travelling along the road when he met with Elgar’nan, and they fought. But they were evenly matched, and though Elgar’nan was the first to fall, they both walked with a limp in their step ever after that. That is why the sun sets every night - Elgar’nan can no longer travel endlessly and must rest.” she stops there, but there’s more to the story - Hallath’evan had twelve children. His wife had had many boys, but longed for a daughter, and she prayed to the gods. They had intervened and changed the child in her womb. The daughter was named Dinah.

Zevran was quiet a moment. “I have never heard of a story of a hero fighting a god so widely spread.”

“We have few stories,” Dinah pointed out. “We must save all we can. Besides - the gods have let us be enslaved and slaughtered for generations. Why shouldn’t we fight them?”

“The Chantry would never say such a thing.”

“No,” she agreed. “And yet they worship a god who has abandoned them, who lets a punishment for a few run wild among the many, killing anything that comes in its path, a god who would choose only a single prophet and would not let his messages pass through any but her.”

“The Dalish would never stand for such a god.”

“Of course not!”

“I only know a little,” he apologised. “But I wish to learn.”

“You’re returning to us,” she reminded him. “You are the fourth child. Ask anything.”

* * *

“It seems an appropriate moment to give you this.”

Dinah stared at the bit of gold and garnet in Zevran’s hand. Was he..? No, he couldn’t possibly be doing this.

“It’s an earring! I acquired it on my very first job with the Crows, a Rivaini merchant. I confess, this is about all he was wearing, but - I took it to mark the occasion. I’d like you to have it.” he just stood there, holding it out.

Dinah was suddenly hyper aware of Wynne and Alistair beside her. Barely three months, and he was already asking her? Well, Ashalle would be delighted, if nothing else.

If she said yes.

“You can sell it if you don’t want to wear it, or whatever you’d like. It’s the least I can give you in return for… everything.” Wait a minute.

“You mean… you’re not…. Giving it to me as a, a, token of affection?” Well, in that case she _couldn’t_ say yes.

“I… just take it.”

Dinah stuck her hands in her pockets. “No.”  It wouldn’t do for anyone from her clan to find out she’d accepted a gift of jewelry, in the presence of a mage, from her lover, and that her lover didn’t consider this noteworthy.

Zevran sighed. “You are a very frustrating elf to deal with, you know that? You pick up every other bit of treasure we come across, but not this earring that would look so lovely across your ear.”

Dinah smiled at him.

* * *

“Zevran,” she said later that evening as they changed into their nightclothes. “About the earring.”

“It’s alright,” he told her. “I said, if you don’t want it-”

“It’s not that,” Dinah interrupted him.

“Then…”

“Zevran…” she paused. “You mean you really don’t _know_?”

“Know what?” He was just as confused as she was frustrated.

“Zevran, you wanted to give me a gift, in front of a mage and a witness, and the whole estate knows we have sex! In the Dalish, that’s a marriage!”

They stared at each other for several long moments.

“I see.” he said at last.

“It’s not that I’m not potentially amenable to the idea,” said Dinah. “But you seemed so awkward about it, and my aunt would never forgive me if she wasn’t there.”

“It was not my intention to put you on the spot, vhenan,” he confessed. “It was not my intention to ask you at all, in fact, but I have been thinking over the past day and I do wish some sort of future with you.”

She sat down beside him, taking his hand. “And you don’t mind that I am enalen?”

“Why would I?”

Dinah laughed. “In my clan… nobody wants to marry enalen. There is too much for us to do, we are always busy, we rarely have time for lovers or families. Only enalen marry other enalen, and you are not.”

“Well then,” he sighed dramatically. “I shall be doomed to a lonely life in the aravel, my wife long away with the herds as I raise our twenty children.”

He was good at making her smile. “And how ever shall you get these children, with me so often away with the halla?”

“I shall take a lover, or three. You will find out and duel them all to the death.”

“Oh goodness, I hope not,” Dinah pretended to turn serious. “I’m terrible with a sword.”

“Mm, perhaps not, then. It would be a great shame to lose my wife to a lovers’ duel.”

Dinah kissed him. “We’ll see if there’s a keeper in the Alienage who can help us tomorrow. I don’t intend to be engaged for any longer than necessary.”

* * *

Everything had changed in the past week. Loghain, banished to Orlais or the Marches, Alistair, betrothed for some foolish shemlen notion that blood mattered more than ability. Dinah vaguely wondered if it would have changed if anyone knew what she suspected about his mother’s blood.

She wasn’t going to open up her mouth about it, though. She knew what happened when shemlen saw the results of their own attacks, and didn’t want to think about what might happen when that result ended up head of...whatever it was. The army, it seemed? Augh, shemlen were strange.

And now….

“You want my child.” her voice was flat, even to her.

“I want a deal.”

“And I would never meet it.” Just her luck, that. Enalen didn’t raise families, and neither did Wardens, even ones with blood mage ex girlfriends.

“You and I would go our separate ways, never inquiring upon each other.”

Dinah mulled it over. A child, to save her life. Creation out of destruction, like the tree over Gelram’s grave. Once, she would have had no qualms sacrificing herself to destroy one of the Forgotten Ones, but she was married now. And yet - a half-elf child, never knowing his Dalish mother, would he even know he was Dalish? What would it be like for him, this half elf, half Chasind child born of darkness? Whose traditions would he follow, whose language would he speak?

“This is what you meant,” Dinah said. “That it would be easier if we did not grow attached.”

Morrigan looked into the fire. “‘Tis indeed.” she turned abruptly. “Well, then? What is your answer?”

Dinah took a deep breath. “I will do it, and I will never go after you, but you must promise me something in return.”

“Tell me what it is and I shall tells you if I can.”

“Promise me he’ll know what he is. That I am  an elf.”

“I will.”

“And that I am Dalish, and ena’asha. He will know what that means.”

“He will.”

“That - that everything about our people that you have learned from me, he’ll learn. Our stories, and our traditions, everything you can give him.”

Morrigan stepped forward. “I shall give this child every piece of his heritage, every scrap of what we have that he might know himself and be whole. I swear this on my and your lives.”

“Then I will do it.”

* * *

She was but thirty-seven when it happened.

A set of drums deep in her head beat unendingly, a low keening rising above them, the song of a creature of the deep forgotten. Two left, only two, and yet they sang so loud in her dreams in a dreadful harmony that she found herself soon wishing that she couldn’t hear anything at all.

The song was all wordless, high enough that any mortal shouldn’t have heard it, yet hear it she did, now in her waking days, a hum deep in her bones that she could never stop.

“It’s only been ten years,” her husband said when she told him.

“I know,” she replied. “I thought it would be longer. No wonder the others never get anything done. They never had enough time.” Short lives and corruption. That was what made a Warden. She wished she’d gone after Morrigan. She’d at least be able to say goodbye.

The Crows would be alright without her - Zevran was rebuilding them, and she was reminded of the story of how they were founded by an elf so clever he took a throne without the king knowing it. Zevran would continue to be a good guildmaster in her absence, as good as he was in her presence.

When they got to the Deep Roads, she silently handed Zevran her longbow. _You know what to do_ . It was the last time she looked into his eyes, and she did not need to speak. _Keep your promise, my love._

She said the prayer that the Dalish said, when they knew they were about to die, and she entered the horde in a flurry of blades.

Dinah Mahariel Sabra fell by an arrow - whose, she would never know.

Perhaps a promise was fulfilled and a contract completed. Perhaps the man returned to his flock, his every target killed.

Perhaps a genlock took her, sensing the falseness of the Calling the Composer had set on her. Perhaps the arrow was one taken from a fallen Legionnaire, not carved of ironbark.

Only Dirthamen knew. But only Dirthamen knew the answer to a question no Dalish wished to know, of darkspawn and ena’len.

And Dirthamen wasn’t telling.


End file.
